Centre for Internet and Society

An Article on Kannada Wikipedia

pavanaja — 2014-12-05T01:22:53Z

I wrote an article on Kannada Wikipedia which was published in the Yojana magazine on November 2014 issue.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/yojana-november-2014-pavanaja-article-on-kannada-wikipedia

ALC signs MoU for better net access

praskrishna — 2014-08-20T06:50:48Z

Andhra Loyola College (ALC) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society – Access to Knowledge (CSI-A2K) here on Thursday.

The MoU will enable faculty and students to have more access on internet world, said the ALC management.

Read the original article published in the Hindu on August 15, 2014.

Institute principal Fr. G.A.P. Kishore, vice-principals Fr. P. Anil Kumar and Fr. Rex Angelo, correspondent Fr. Raju and CSI-A2K programme director T. Vishnu Vardhan signed the papers. Faculty of various departments participated in the programme. Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Kishore said for the first time in AP, ALC has made the MoU with CSI-A2K to work collaboratively to improve Telugu Wikipedia. Very soon the digital content in botany, physics, Telugu, chemistry, ethics, religion, music and other subjects of the institution would be produced in Telugu Wikipedia, said the principal.

“A ten-member core committee has been constituted to train the faculty in each department in the college on A2K, who will teach the students. CSI will train the trainers and upload the material from time to time,” said Mr. Rex Angelo. Mr. Vishnu Vardhan said that CSI is promoting institutional partnerships across the country to promote regional languages. The society has plans to team up with more colleges in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh and take up more outreach programmes in the next few days.

“Wikipedia has access to over 287 languages and 3.5 crore essays in the world. It is very unfortunate, that it has very few items in Indian languages,” said the programme director.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-august-15-2014-alc-signs-mou-for-better-net-access

Aircel & Wikimedia Foundation announce Wikipedia Zero

pavanaja — 2014-07-07T05:58:08Z

Aircel and Wikimedia Foundation came together to announce Wikipedia Zero. As per this, users of Aircel need not pay for data for accessing Wikipedia. Dr. U.B.Pavanaja wrote a report on this in Prajavani.

Click here to read the article published in Prajavani on July 3, 2014.

ಗ್ಯಾಜೆಟ್ ಸುದ್ದಿ

ಏರ್‌ಸೆಲ್ ಬಳಸುವವರಿಗೆ ಉಚಿತ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ

ಮೊಬೈಲ್ ಫೋನ್ ಸೇವೆ ನೀಡುವ ಏರ್‌ಸೆಲ್ ಕಂಪೆನಿ ಮತ್ತು ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯವನ್ನು ನಡೆಸುವ ವಿಕಿಮೀಡಿಯ ಫೌಂಡೇಶನ್ ಜೊತೆಗೂಡಿದ್ದಾರೆ. ಏರ್‌ಸೆಲ್ ಗ್ರಾಹಕರು ತಮ್ಮ ಸ್ಮಾರ್ಟ್‌ಫೋನ್‌ಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯವನ್ನು ಬಳಸಿದರೆ ಅವರು ಅಂತರಜಾಲ ಬಳಕೆಗೆ ಹಣ ನೀಡಬೇಕಾಗಿರುವುದಿಲ್ಲ. ಇದು ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಬಳಸುವವರಿಗೆ ಒಳ್ಳೆಯ ಸುದ್ದಿ. ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಝೀರೊ ಎಂಬುದು ಆಫ್ರಿಕದಲ್ಲಿ ಪ್ರಾರಂಭವಾದ ಯೋಜನೆ.

ಇದರ ಪ್ರಕಾರ ಮೊಬೈಲ್ ಸೇವೆ ನೀಡುವ ಕಂಪೆನಿ ತಮ್ಮ ಗ್ರಾಹಕರು ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ವೀಕ್ಷಿಸಿದರೆ ಮಾಹಿತಿ ಪ್ರವಾಹಕ್ಕೆ (ಡಾಟಾ) ಹಣ ನೀಡಬೇಕಾಗಿರುವುದಿಲ್ಲ. ಭಾರತದಲ್ಲಿ ಈ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಝೀರೊ ಯೋಜನೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಸದ್ಯಕ್ಕೆ ಏರ್‌ಸೆಲ್ ಮಾತ್ರ ಭಾಗಿಯಾಗಿದೆ. ಇಂಗ್ಲಿಷ್ ಮಾತ್ರವಲ್ಲದೆ ಇತರೆ ಭಾರತೀಯ ಭಾಷೆಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಬಳಸುವವರಿಗೆ ಇದು ಒಳ್ಳೆಯ ಸುದ್ದಿ.

See the portion about Wikipedia Zero below:

Click to download the PDF here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/prajavani-july-3-2014-article-on-wikipedia-zero

Ahmednagar — Marathi Wikipedia Workshop

Tanveer Hasan — 2013-07-26T09:34:47Z

Wikipedia Community members helped the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications Programme (HEIRA), CSCS Bangalore organize a day-long workshop on ‘Digital Literacy’ at Ahmednagar College, Ahmednagar, Maharasthra on January 17, 2013. Tanveer Hasan of HEIRA shares with us the developments in this report.

Ahmednagar College is one of the participant colleges in the ‘Pathways to Higher Education’ programme anchored by HEIRA, and run in collaboration with CIS. This programme works closely with undergraduate students in three states to address the problem of quality of access to higher education. The focus of the programme is on inculcating critical and analytical skills which play a very important role in gaining access to knowledge.

The Wikipedia workshop in Marathi held at the Ahmednagar College intended to introduce the students to the concepts of open and free sources of knowledge, and encourage active Marathi editors to edit and populate the Marathi Wikipedia domain.

Yogesh Khandke was representing the Wikipedia community. He started off by explaining the five pillars of Wikipedia, the copyright issues and the importance of references and citations. As most of the students were new to the concepts of both editing and knowledge production, we faced a few problems in the beginning. Since the IP addresses were already cleared for multiple registrations we did not face that particular problem.

The students were asked to come up with material and information that they would want to add to the Marathi Wikipedia domain. We conducted a group activity where the groups exchanged the information they were planning to use. These groups researched, proof read and added to the information collected by their friends. We had stressed that all the information needed to be cited from a reliable source and must have a clear reference. Hence, a lot of unnecessary and opinionated information was cleared at the first level itself.

The hands-on editing session proved to be challenging as most of the students did not know how to type in Marathi and ended up using phonetic keyboards. The session ended with all the students having been registered as Wikipedia editors and most of the groups were successful in editing. A couple of groups created new pages as well.

Yogesh Khandke was of immense help and he was ably supported by Nagesh Shelake, Dept. of Sociology, New Arts and Science College, Ahmednagar.

A special thanks to Dr. S.B Iyyer, Department of Physics, Ahmednagar College and Coordinator of Pathways Cell, and Raikwad, Department of Commerce and Assistant Coordinator of Pathways Cell.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/ahmednagar-marathi-wikipedia-workshop-report

Advocating for Openness: Nine Ways Civil Society Groups Have Mobilized to Defend Internet Freedom

Admin — 2017-11-26T03:58:47Z

The debate over whether the Internet is a better tool for democratic empowerment or authoritarian control misconstrues the nature of the democratic challenges of the digital age.

The blog post by Sarah Oh was published by the Center for International Media Assistance on November 15, 2017

Key Findings

Civil society groups from the Global South are leading the charge to advocate for an Internet that remains open, pluralistic, and democratic. The nine case studies highlighted in this report demonstrate various ways groups in different countries have successfully fought for policies and norms that strengthen Internet freedom and digital rights. These strategies include awareness-raising, nonviolent direct action, regional and international coalition-building, and strategic litigation.

Media freedom advocates have been at the forefront of many Internet freedom efforts.
Threats to independent media online and freedom of expression continue to mount as authoritarian regimes become more technologically savvy.
Building broad civil society coalitions around Internet rights increases the chances of long-term success.

Introduction

The debate over whether the Internet is a better tool for democratic empowerment or authoritarian control misconstrues the nature of the democratic challenges of the digital age. The Internet is not a tool, but a complex domain of “competing forces and constraints.”1 These forces are comprised of powerful businesses, states, politicians, criminal enterprises, advocacy groups: in short, all of the elements present in any democracy. But in this cyber-democracy, forces compete in part on the shifting ground of the technological and physical infrastructure of the Internet, where some players wield more power than others with an ability to mold the terrain in their favor. Authoritarian states aware of what is at stake in the evolution of the Internet are beginning to engage in long-term and well-resourced efforts to undermine the democratic rights of citizens in this more fundamental way.

In a reference to the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that take down a specific website, these broader efforts represent what some have called a “distributed denial-of-democracy” (DDoD) attack aimed at reducing the utility of the Internet for genuine democratic discourse. These efforts, which are coordinated and well resourced, are often more insidious, harder to detect, and have the overall effect of undermining civic engagement and overall trust in the media ecosystem.

And while the diffuse and fast-changing nature of Internet can at times make it difficult for authoritarian regimes to exert their control, the complex interplay between technology, laws, infrastructure, and socio-political factors shaping the Internet make it equally difficult for democratic actors to counteract these DDoD strategies. As an additional obstacle, the values that underpin Internet freedom can be sidelined in the forums and governing bodies that set Internet standards by the dominance in those spaces of private tech companies concerned primarily with generating profits.

Formidable though they may be, these challenges are not insurmountable. Civil society groups from the Global South are leading the charge to advocate for an Internet that remains open, pluralistic, and democratic. The nine case studies highlighted in this report demonstrate various ways groups in different countries have successfully fought for policies and norms that strengthen Internet freedom and digital rights. These strategies include awareness-raising, nonviolent direct action, regional and international coalition-building, and strategic litigation.

Each of the following case studies corresponds to one of the nine guiding principles of a Democratic Framework to Interpret Open Internet Principles. This framework was collaboratively developed by a network of civil society groups worldwide to illuminate the ways that an open Internet is essential for the functioning of democratic societies. It was inspired by the norms and standards developed by the Internet Rights and Principles Dynamic Coalition (IRPC) of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum.

The framework is an important starting point for more effective, coordinated effort to ensure that the Internet remains a welcoming place for democratic life. Its aim is to create a consensus around the values that should shape the future development of the Internet. But moreover, it also provides an avenue for understanding and sharing knowledge on the concrete strategies that can be put into practice in different contexts to make sure that the Internet remains a level playing field. The following nine examples demonstrate how citizen groups can mobilize to enshrine such democratic principles in cyberspace.

“The debate over whether the Internet is a better tool for democratic empowerment or authoritarian control misconstrues the nature of the democratic challenges of the digital age.”

1. Freedom of Expression

In the Philippines, a cybercrime law introduced in 2012 proposed increasing penalties for libel and giving authorities unchecked power to track information online. Internet freedom activists worried several provisions of the law would infringe on freedom of expression by preventing Filipinos from freely posting content on websites, and participating in online forums and discussions without fear of being blocked or facing serious penalties. In response, pro-democracy organizations from across the political spectrum joined together to challenge the constitutionality of the law. Through protests, roundtables, and capacity building activities, they raised awareness and encouraged advocacy efforts around the dangers the law posted to freedom of expression and privacy. The Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA ), a digital rights organization founded after the fall of the Marcos dictatorship and the Philippine Internet Freedom Alliance (PIFA), a broad nationwide coalition of pro-democracy and Internet freedom advocates, were among the organizations in the front lines on the struggle. PIFA was even one of the 20 organizations to file 15 petitions to the Supreme Court about the constitutionality of the law.

Public efforts in the courts and actions in the streets contributed to the takedown of three contested provisions of the law, including provision that would allow government to block or restrict access to computer data. The Supreme Court declared these provisions unconstitutional and delayed implementation of the law. Despite public concerns about the surviving provisions, the national campaign against the cybercrime law led to a turning point for Filipino activists; it showed the power of people coming together and fighting for the importance of digital rights in the Philippines. Initially fragmented, the campaign led to a larger movement unified under the goal of protecting human rights and freedom of expression online. Thus, it took the introduction of a flawed law and active public campaigns to initiate a broader dialogue about privacy, surveillance, and digital security. Digital rights communities across Southeast Asia have been inspired by Filipino advocacy efforts, which they have understood to be an example of how to communicate the balance required between anti-cybercrime measures with fundamental rights to a public audience.

2. Freedom of Assembly and Association

Social media is an important organizing tool for journalists and advocacy groups in Uganda. Facebook, WhatsApp, and other messaging applications have been used to share political knowledge, connect leaders with supporters, and organize events — even share information about government abuses. During national ‘Walk to Work’ protests in 2011, organized to protest living costs after presidential elections, Facebook and Twitter provided a steady stream of updates from protestors, bystanders, and journalists.

Using social media, however, can have dangerous consequences for marginalized groups such as the LGBT community. The government of Uganda has been known to collect user information and prosecute individuals based on information shared on social media. Uganda is one of 76 countries where homosexuality is currently criminalized, and LGBT activists fear that their online conversations will be monitored and used against them. By posting information taken from photos and content posted on Facebook, a local tabloid exposed the identity of numerous members of the LGBT community in 2011 and again in 2014. The tabloid stories in 2011 are believed to have contributed to the killing of David Kato, a prominent gay rights activist.

Furthermore, the government has repeatedly restricted access for advocacy groups to use the Internet to share political information. In 2016, the country’s media regulator restricted the use of WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter to prevent the organizing of protests before presidential elections in February as the government had done before in 2011. In both cases, the electoral commission enforced the social media shut-down.

Civil society groups have responded in two ways. First, they have sought to deepen their digital security capacity. To protect against threats to journalists, LGBT organizations, and other groups have learned how to use Facebook and social media applications more securely and to implement other practices that increase their privacy. In the lead up to the 2016 election this included the use of virtual private networks (VPNs) to share information. Civil society groups spread information about how to use them through radio broadcasts. The fact that the hashtag #UgandaDecides trended on Twitter shows how they were able to spread their knowledge through local networks and connect with international media. Secondly, civil society groups built coalitions with international organizations to draw attention to abuses taking place in Uganda. In 2016, Access Now supported a coalition of groups to demand that the government stop the Internet shutdown as part of the #KeepitOn campaign.

3. Accessibility

In Nigeria, national broadband plans have overlooked rural communities, leaving them with low bandwidth and high-cost options for Internet access. This means that broadband and mobile data fees are unaffordable to many in Nigeria, especially the poor. Fixed-line broadband subscriptions cost an average of 39 percent of average income, and mobile broadband packages cost 13 percent. Given that approximately 80 percent of Nigerians earn below the poverty line ($2 a day or less), access to the Internet is out of reach and unaffordable for a majority of citizens in Nigeria.

The Alliance for Affordable Internet, a global coalition working on Internet affordability, works with Nigerian civil society leaders to raise awareness around this issue through thematic working groups. The consumer advocacy and pricing transparency working group, for instance, works closely with a coalition of Nigerian NGOs that have been leading campaigns to raise awareness about pricing and taxation policies that have been proposed in Nigeria. One proposed policy includes imposing a nine percent tax on voice, data, and SMS services to consumers. This policy would make the Internet dramatically more expensive for Nigerian consumers. Groups say they worry about the consequences of the proposed policy in an environment where farmers are forced to climb trees just to get a stable Internet connection.

Civil society leaders who are part of the coalition have worked to build a healthy dialogue between regulators, civil society, and the government. A key strategy, according to activists, has been encouraging groups to find constructive ways to work with government and leveraging the interests of each of these groups to protect and drive down costs for Nigerian consumers. They seek to build relationships with the regulator and to inform them about ways to better communicate with and engage consumer groups, such as sharing their content through social media rather than press releases. Another important learning has been identifying champions within government to work on these issues.

4. Privacy and Data Protection

In Burma, gaps in the law have left citizens vulnerable when it comes to privacy and data protection. Restrictions on privacy have eased since the country’s transition from military rule, but a lack of data protection laws and general lack of awareness around privacy and data protection present significant challenges for protecting an open Internet.

Messaging applications such as Viber and Facebook Messenger, for example, are the de-facto tool for communication for activists and are used to organize political events and activities. Cheaper than voice calls, far more accessible than landlines, and easier to use than email, these tools are the primary way people in Burma communicate. Activists have received harsh penalties for sharing content that may be viewed as threatening state security. These applications are often not secure, making it possible for Burma state authorities or agents of the state to intercept their conversations. During a crackdown on student protests in March 2015, mobile phones were taken by police. Activists worried at the time that information on these phones would eventually be used against them.

Observing the need to protect activists and educate them about data protection, activists in 2016 formed a coalition, Digital Rights MM. The coalition, led by Phandeeyar, Myanmar Center for Responsible Business, Myanmar ICT for Development, and Free Expression Myanmar, has led a national conversation on the issue. Drawing on expertise from the region and international organizations, 22 local Burma-based organizations have been successful in pointing out gaps when it comes to privacy and freedom of expression in the national telecommunications law, a comprehensive law that oversees the development of the telecommunications sector in Burma. They also participated in meetings with the government and launched a public facing campaign #ourvoiceourhluttaw pushing to amend 23 articles, including one on lawful interception of data.

“Messaging applications such as Viber and Facebook Messenger, for example, are the de-facto tool for communication for activists and are used to organize political events and activities.”

5. Personal Safety and Security

In Pakistan, women face threats of physical, sexual, and psychological harassment online. Leaking explicit photos and threats of blackmail are growing increasingly more common. From 2014 to 2015, more than 3,000 cybercrimes were reported to the Federal Investigation Agency and of those cases, nearly half were targeted to women on social media. Observers estimate far more cases go unreported. In fact, in workshops conducted by the The Digital Rights Foundation, many female college students reported that they did not know cyber harassment was a crime.

Online platforms are an important space for political engagement, expression, and mobilization in Pakistan. Thus, online harassment directly impacts the political participation of women, including female journalists and women politicians. In 2016 the Digital Rights Foundation established a Cyber Harassment Helpline that women can reach out to for help when they are harassed on the Internet. One of the main objective of the helpline is to help bridge the trust deficit between survivors and law enforcement agencies. An analysis of more than 400 cases showed that the most common barriers to equal participation are non-consensual use of information, impersonation, account hacking, black mailing, and receiving unsolicited messages; the most targeted groups include women, children, human rights defenders, and minority communities. The Digital Rights Foundation has also been leading efforts to strengthen legal protections for women and responding to survivors by recommendations to law enforcement agencies and the government. Pakistan has a National Response Centre for Cybercrime, but it has faced challenges serving women outside of major cities.

6. Inclusion

In India, the population of people with disabilities is estimated to be as high as 150 million people, and the recorded rates of those who are vision-impaired are among the highest in the world. Indian digital rights advocacy groups, like the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) have worked to ensure that these individuals are able to participate fully online by promoting policies that prioritize accessibility. These include the National Policy on Universal Electronics Accessibility, the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, and Guidelines for Indian Government Web (GIGW), which all require government information be shared in formats that are accessible. Advocacy groups, however, have successfully shown that policies alone are not enough and have taken action to ensure persons with disabilities have access to critical resources and information online.

Mobile phones in particular are a vital portal to access government services, but mobile applications remain largely inaccessible to many people with disabilities, especially those with vision disabilities. For example, CIS observed in 2015 that the MyGov, the Indian Government’s mobile citizen engagement platform and the Prime Minister’s application was highly inaccessible: screens cannot be navigated by visually impaired users and can also not be read using a screen reader. Based on this, CIS with other advocacy organizations worked on framing accessibility guidelines for mobile applications recommended to the Government of India as a standard. Advocacy groups, such as the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People (NCPEDP), have also been appealing to the private sector to ensure products designed to serve these needs are affordable and readily available to people with disabilities. They appeal to Indian companies and policymakers by advocating for the universal appeal of assistive technology to ensure disabled communities are not left behind.

Sustained advocacy, new legal mandates applied to public and private sectors, and increased research in this domain have helped advance the issue of accessibility of mobile applications. The country’s National Informatics Centre has set up a committee to revise the GIGW to bring them up to speed with international standards.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/news/cima-sarah-oh-november-15-2017-openness-nine-ways-civil-society-groups-have-mobilized-to-defend-internet-freedom

Adopting ORCID as a Unique Identifier will Benefit all Involved in Scholarly Communication

Subbiah Arunachalam and Muthu Madhan — 2016-10-28T16:28:49Z

ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a nonprofit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. Together with other persistent identifiers for scholarly works such as digital object identifiers (DOIs) and identifiers for organizations, ORCID makes research more discoverable.

The research paper jointly authored by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam and Muthu Madhan was published on the eprints@IISc repository on October 28, 2016. The article was originally published in the National Medical Journal of India, Vol. 29, No.4, 2016.

It helps ensure that one’s grants, publications and outputs are correctly attributed. It helps the research community not just in aggregating publications, but in every stage of research, viz. publishing, reviewing, profiling, metrics, accessing and archiving. Funding agencies in Austria, Australia, Denmark, Portugal, Sweden and the UK, and the world’s leading scholarly publishers and associations have integrated their systems with ORCID registry. Among the BRICS countries, China and South Africa are adopting ORCID avidly. India is yet to make a beginning. If research councils and funding agencies in India require researchers to adopt ORCID and link ORCID iDs to funding as well as tracking performance, it will help them keep track of the workflow. Journal editors can also keep track of contributions made by different authors and work assigned to different reviewers through their ORCID iDs.

INTRODUCTION

Names in scholarly publishing are not all that simple. Names here mean both names of authors of papers and names of researchers referred to in those papers. They can cause much confusion to researchers, editors of journals, database producers, librarians and bibliometricists, but if we handle them correctly we can overcome most of the problems.

SCHOLARLY LITERATURE: DISAMBIGUATION OF NAMES AND AGGREGATING ONE’S WORKS

As early as 1969, Eugene Garfield had expressed his dismay at the ‘needless ambiguity and confusion’ caused by authors who omit parts of their names and initials in their published works, and recommended that ‘scientists who are just now embarking on their careers would be well advised to measure the information content on their names as they appear in indexes such as Index Medicus, Physics Abstracts, Biological Abstracts and Science Citation Index.[1] Some 12 years later, he wrote a detailed paper on the problems the scholarly world faces on account of mere names of people.[2] He had reasons to worry more than anyone else; as the publisher of Science Citation Index, Current Contents and several other search and indexing tools for the world’s scientists and scholars, he had the unenviable task of processing millions of papers and author names not only in the byline of these papers but also in the references cited in them and rendering these author names accurately and attributing research papers to the right authors and institutions within a few weeks of publication.

People hail from all parts of the world and from different cultures, each having its own peculiarities in naming their people so much so people from one culture may find names of another strange. Added to that are the ways names from different cultures and languages are transliterated into the Roman script. The names in most parts of the western world have three parts, viz. the first name (or given name), middle name and last name (also called the family name or surname). Often the last name may have more than one word, e.g. Duncan Smith, von Braun, van der Waals, de Solla Price. The prefix ‘van’ in some names may be spelt with a capital V, albeit rarely, e.g. Van de Graaff (of generator fame). In some cultures there are a very large number of people having the same surname. For example, close to 85% of China’s population have one of only 129 surnames, and three names in particular, viz. Wang, Li and Chen, are predominant among authors publishing currently. Also there are two Chinese surnames that can be spelt as Wang when publishing in English language, says Jane Qiu.[3] Eight Chinese names transliterate in Roman script into Wei Wang and to avoid ambiguity in such cases journals may allow authors the option to include their names in their own language in parentheses after the transliterated name.[4] Among Korean authors, Kim and Park account for a large percentage. In India there are many Agarwals, Guptas, Mukherjees, Raos, Sharmas and Singhs among publishing authors. While some Indians have two-part surnames, e.g. Ghosh Dastidar, Guha Thakurta and Sen Sharma, a few drop their initials altogether, e.g. Karmeshu.

Some have hyphenated names, e.g. Noel-Baker, Szent-Györgyi, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, all three Nobel laureates. Curiously, Noel-Baker was born Philip Baker, but took Noel as his second surname on marriage to Irene Noel and subsequently started hyphenating his surname. But in the majority of cases hyphenated names are those of women who add their husband’s family name to their own, e.g. Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, Rita Levi-Montalcini, both of whom won Nobel Prizes for medicine, and Irene JoliotCurie, who won a Nobel Prize for chemistry. In a variation, Marie Curie, née Sklodowska, who won Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry, used her husband’s name ahead of her maiden name: Marie Curie, née Sklodowska. Some examples from among Fellows of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy: mathematician Rajinder Jeet HansGill, photochemist Krishna Kamini Rohatgi-Mukherjee, plant physiologist Renu Khanna-Chopra, condensed matter physicist Tanusri Saha-Dasgupta, development biologist Professor Priyambada Mohanty-Hejmadi, conservation biologist Professor Asha Chandola-Saklani, and neurophysiologist Professor Sushil Dua-Sharma. Many of these women scientists have published papers both under their maiden names and under their hyphenated family names.

In Japan, married couples are required by a 1898 law, which is valid till date, to have the same surname, even though giving up one’s maiden name does disadvantage women in certain ways, including professionally.[5]

Both retaining one’s maiden name and adopting the husband’s surname have their advantages. If one achieves a lot as a young person, one would be better off retaining the name that brought her the reputation in the first place. If one achieves much after taking her husband’s name, she will have much to lose if she ever gets a divorce. Better to hold on to one’s maiden name, says Kalpana Sharma.[6] Some professionals, e.g. Bhatnagar award winner and fluid flows expert Professor Rama Govindarajan, has chosen this option. The situation is changing in India albeit slowly. A woman in Maharashtra can now use either her father’s or husband’s names in all official documents.

There are also rare instances of people changing their names midway in their career, e.g. a woman electrical engineer of Indian origin working in the University of Waterloo has over the years published under three different names, viz. K.H. Sheshakamal, Shesha Jayaram, Shesha H. Jayaram (personal communication, Muthanna J, 23 Dec 2015).

Missing middle name in the byline, spelling mistakes and problems faced in printing (or processing by computers) texts with diacritical marks can all lead to ambiguity. But with all these vagaries, it is important that contributions such as papers, patents, datasets and software are attributed to the right contributors.

Many researchers have recognized the problem of author name disambiguation. A Scopus search (on 28 June 2015) using the key words ‘author name’ and ‘disambiguation’ led to 86 papers in the 13-year period 2003–2015. Of these, 46 had the keywords in the title. Some of these papers were related to the problems faced by biomedical databases, e.g.

Author Name Disambiguation for PubMed, http://online library.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.23063/pdf
Author Name Disambiguation in MEDLINE, http://www. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2805000

From 2012 onwards PubMed uses a ranking algorithm for author searches to show more relevant results by disambiguating common author names.[7] This helps pooling papers by the real A.K. Sen when there are papers by others with the same name and initials.

The name ambiguity problem can only be solved collaboratively, when all stakeholders agree on a standard identification scheme.

Rachel Bruce, deputy chief innovation officer, Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc), UK, says that our inability to associate valuable research outputs with their right authors ‘has led to extremely inefficient research management and difficulty in identifying what has been produced. Ineffective reporting and sharing of research impact on both individual researcher’s and universities’ profiles.’ According to her, ‘wider adoption and use of Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID)’ is the solution to this problem.[8]

WHAT IS ORCID?

A person’s ORCID iD takes the form of a unique 16-digit number, e.g. 0000-0000-0000-0000. ORCID also gives each person a web page profile based on the iD, e.g. http://orcid.org/0000-00024398-4658, listing their iD number, name(s), institution(s) and publications. (Generally ORCID is used for the organization and the registry, and ORCID iD to denote the identifier itself.) Publications here go beyond research publications such as journal articles, conference papers, dissertations, reports, research techniques, software and inventions to include books, lectures/ speeches, websites, etc.

These profiles or records together comprise the ORCID registry. This registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers (http://orcid.org/node/47) is created and maintained by an open, non-profit, community-driven effort. ORCID iDs help distinguish individuals with common names, and they are not affected by changes in name or name order or alphabet in which the name is rendered. ORCID is researcher-controlled; the researcher decides what information is included in her ORCID record.

ORCID iDs can be embedded in research workflows. If included by the publisher or funding agency, they are part of the metadata associated with scholarly works and grants. Together with other persistent identifiers for scholarly works such as DOIs and identifiers for organizations, ORCID makes research more discoverable.

But ORCID is not the first such attempt to associate unambiguously research papers (and other output such as datasets and software) with the right authors. Fenner has listed a number of them.[9] Some of these cover only specific fields. Some are country specific. Some are proprietary. Some are linked to specific databases while others want to cover a wide area of science and scholarship. Fenner’s list includes RePEc Author (set up by Thomas Krichel in 1999), LATTES (an information platform mandatory for researchers in Brazil, set up by the National Council of Scientific and Technological Development or CNPq, in 1999), VIAF (set up by OCLC in 2003), NARCIS (set up in 2004 by the Royal Academy of Sciences of the Netherlands and mandatory for all researchers in the Netherlands), arXiv Author ID (set up in 2005 by Cornell University for researchers in physics and related disciplines), Scopus Author ID (set up in 2006 by Elsevier), Names Project Mimas (set up in 2007 by the British Library for authors and institutions in all academic disciplines), Researcher ID (set up in 2008 by Thomson Reuters) and Author Claim (set up by Thomas Krichel in 2008).

If there are many author identity services already available, why add ORCID, one may ask. The other services are not truly interoperable, whereas ORCID allows linkage to other identifiers such as Scopus ID and Researcher ID. ORCID is the only service trying to associate its identifier with other existing author identifiers, with more than publications, and to collaborate across the community to embed it at the time that a work is ‘released’ by a researcher. Also, most other services are linked to a single bibliographic database (e.g. Researcher ID is linked to Web of Science).

‘Thus, since none of the available author identifier services looked like the solution to the name ambiguity problem, the ORCID initiative was started in late 2009 and formed as a nonprofit organization in August 2010.’[10]

Why should a researcher have an ORCID iD?

This section draws on information mainly from private communication with the Executive Director and other staff of

ORCID and the Library Guide of the University of Southampton.[11]

ORCID helps ensure that one’s grants, publications and outputs are correctly attributed. It is for life, irrespective of where one chooses to live and work. Connections between the ORCID registry and other databases help one to keep one’s research profile updated and to make it visible worldwide. Authors with an ORCID iD can have Crossref automatically push information about their published work to their ORCID record.[12]

Often researchers waste much time in filling forms that require address, employment history, collaborator names, affiliation, etc. when applying for jobs, awards, academy fellowships or grants or submitting manuscripts to journals. One can have all such information in one’s ORCID profile and draw upon it at short notice. Researchers can save much of their productive time by linking their ORCID iDs to the grants or manuscript processing systems.

As the Caltech Library Guide points out, as one collaborates across disciplines, institutions and borders, one ‘must interact with an increasing number and diversity of research information systems. Entering data over and over again can be time-consuming, and often frustrating’ (http://libguides.caltech.edu/orcid).

To obtain the list of publications of a researcher from a database such as Web of Science, one would need to give the name (with all variants), research domains and names of organizations (with all their variants) associated with the author. With all that, one may not get the full list. But if one uses the researcher’s ORCID iD in the identifier field, the search will give the correct list instantaneously.

Anstey, editor of the 125-year-old British Journal of Dermatology, has explained lucidly why researchers, editors and funders should embrace ORCID and how through ORCID iDs one could connect to websites such as Web of Science, figshare, Impact story and others.[13]

How do researchers get an ORCID iD?

Scientists, researchers, teachers, students, clinicians, scholars, authors and anyone at all, contributing to scholarly outputs from anywhere in the world can sign up for a free ORCID iD through the ORCID website (https://orcid.org/register). It is also possible to create an ID at other websites that are integrated with ORCID, for example manuscript submission websites of journals. About 5000 journals, including those published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), Taylor & Francis, and Cambridge University Press, use ScholarOne developed by Thomson Reuters and whenever one submits a paper to these journals one is asked to provide an ORCID iD. And if you do not have one you can create it through the publisher’s Application Program Interface (API). Claiming an ORCID iD is not at all difficult. After claiming, researchers can associate the ORCID iDs with their education and employment details and details related to collaborators, publications and outputs.

Including one’s publications is simple. One can import bibliographic details of one’s publications having unique identifiers (e.g. DOI, ISBN) from the list of databases integrated with ORCID registry. The list includes Scopus, Web of Science, Europe PubMed Central, Crossref Metadata Search, Redalyc, etc.[14]One can just log in to ORCID and choose the database from which one wants to import bibliographic data. For publications that are not indexed by the databases integrated with ORCID, one can use the template provided by ORCID to manually add details. Also ORCID has created a tool by which one can import bibliographic data from BibTeX (.bib) files into one’s ORCID record, including files exported from Google Scholar and other popular reference management tools.[15]

Is one’s ORCID private information?

Of course, one can choose which information to be assigned as public or private in one’s record except the actual iDs assigned by ORCID that are designed to be publicly available. Once researchers have claimed their ORCID iD, the settings are in their sole control. ORCID has a privacy selector option that lets one set the privacy level of all new works, education, employment and funding items. Usually, everyone makes the list of publications public.

ORCID features

ORCID offers its essential features for free to individual researchers and organizations across the world. Researchers would be able to automatically update their ORCID record with links to published manuscripts in which they have included their ORCID iD. However, ORCID charges membership fees from organizations such as publishers, funders, and academic and research institutions, in order to sustain the registry and the mission to achieve name disambiguation, and in return offers them premium API services and personalized technical support. Also, when many organizations join as a consortium, they benefit from reduced ORCID membership costs and enhanced technical support.

ORCID conforms to the values of an open scholarly infrastructure organization.[16] Indeed, Public Knowledge Project (PKP) Director John Willinsky considers ORCID ‘an important emerging technology with opportunities to help shape and improve the open access publishing landscape worldwide’.[17]Organizations can integrate ORCID iDs into research management systems and workflows using the free public API. ORCID releases a public data file annually under Creative Commons License (CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication) to support broad access to data that are made public by individual researchers through their ORCID records. The file contains the public information associated with each user’s ORCID record. Each record is included as a separate file in both JSON and XML formats (http://orcid.org/content/ orcid-public-data-file-2014).

ORCID helps institutions track one’s work, compile information for university-level reporting (including total funding received by its scholars), and more efficiently manage information on faculty profiles. By eliminating redundancies and automating some reporting functions, ORCID will be especially helpful in reducing time and monies spent on other assessment activities such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK.[18]

Feedback from a pilot study with eight UK universities showed that organizations that have adopted ORCID were likely to see ‘measurable efficiency improvements within two years of implementation—especially in internal data quality, streamlining of publications management, and enhanced reporting to funders— with accrued benefits increasing steadily over the following three to four years.’[19]

Jan Jan Jan Jan

2013 2014 2015 2016

Year

FIG 1. Growth of ORCID iDs (http://support.orcid.org/ knowledgebase/articles/150557-number-of-orcid-ids)

Funders, 5%

Associations, 7%

Repositories,

10%

Publishers,

13%

Research institutes,

65%

FIG 2. Sectoral distribution of ORCID members (Haak LL, personal communication, 30 Sep 2015)

Middle East and

Africa, 2% South America, 1%

Australasia, 6%

Asia, 8%

North Europe, 53%

America,

30%

FIG 3. Geographical distribution of ORCID members (Haak LL, personal communication, 30 Sep 2015)

Uptake of ORCID

The number of live ORCID iDs grew rapidly from late 2012 (Fig. 1) and as of 29 July 2016, it exceeded 2.43 million. These are currently used by more than 200 research and workflow platforms at academic and other research institutions, at funding agencies and at publishers.

As of mid-December 2015, more than 350 organizations have opted for ORCID’s member services and are at different stages of integrating ORCID iDs into their systems and workflows (Miyairi N, personal communication, 18 Dec 2015). As of 30 September 2015, 65% of ORCID members were universities (Fig. 2) spread all over the globe (Fig. 3). A representative list of different categories of members is provided in Box 1. The large European contingent is a result of three national consortia. These proportions are expected to be fluid over the next couple of years as more consortia are formed and join ORCID (Haak LL, personal communication, 30 Sep 2015).

Recognizing that publishers can promote systems that would provide support to researchers and to science, commencing January 2016, eight publishers will be requiring the use of ORCID iDs by corresponding authors during the publication process. These include the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS; publishers of Science), American Geophysical Union

(AGU), eLife, EMBO, Hindawi, IEEE, the Public Library of

Box 1. Uptake of ORCID Among the long list of members of ORCID are:

Publishers: AIP Publishing, Elsevier, National Academy of Sciences (USA), Oxford University Press, Public Library of Science (PLoS), Science Open, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, Wolters Kluwer

Associations: American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS), American Astronomical Society, American Chemical Society, American Psychological Association, American Physical Society, American Society of Microbiology, American Society of Civil Engineers, Association of Computing Machinery, Electrochemical Society, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), IOP, Modern Language Association, Royal Society of Chemistry

Universities: Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Caltech, Cornell University, Lund University, Stockholm University, City University of Hong Kong, National Taiwan University, CINECA, Italy’s consortium of 70 universities and four research institutes

Academies: African Academy of Science, Chinese Academy of Science, Royal Society

Funding agencies: National Institutes of Health (USA), Department of Energy (USA), Wellcome Trust (UK), National Institute for Health Research (UK), Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portugal)

Intergovernmental bodies: CABI, CERN, International Food Policy Research Institute, International Water Management Institute

Libraries: British Library, Royal Library – Denmark

Repositories: Social Science Research Network (SSRN) For the full list of members, see http://orcid.org/about/ community/members

Science (PLoS), and the Royal Society. More than 3000 journals are already collecting ORCID iDs from corresponding authors. Currently about 75% of all registrations are through journal accounts.

Similarly, six consortia too will require the use of ORCID iDs. These are: Jisc (50 universities and research councils, UK), Italy/ ANVUR (70+ universities and research institutes), Australia, via the Australian Access Federation (40 universities, research institutes, and Australian Research Council and National Health and Medical Research Council funders), and three library consortia in the US: Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) consisting of 15 universities in the US midwest, the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA), a consortium of 35 research libraries located in the central and western US, and the North East Research Libraries Consortium (NERL) comprising 29 core member academic research libraries and approximately 90 affiliate member academic and/or research libraries.

Jisc negotiated an ORCID consortium through which universities would benefit from premium ORCID membership at significantly reduced costs. The official launch event for the consortium took place at Imperial College in late September 2015 with the participation of more than 50 UK universities, ORCID, Jisc, GuildHE, RCUK and Current Research Information System (CRIS) vendors.[20]Since August 2015, the Wellcome Trust has required all lead applicants for grants to provide an ORCID iD.[21]From 23 September 2015, an ORCID iD has become mandatory for all new National Institute of Health Research (NIHR, UK) personal award applications.[22]

Italy has implemented ORCID on a national scale, and has signed a three-year consortium membership agreement with ORCID. Under the auspices of ANVUR (National Agency for the Evaluation of the University and Research Systems) and CRUI (the Conference of Italian University Rectors), 70 universities and four research centres initially participate in the consortium (Cineca). ANVUR made ORCID mandatory in order to participate in the National Assessment from November 2015.[23]The Italians expect that at least 80% of Italian researchers will have an ORCID iD, with links to their research output by the end of 2016.[23]

ORCID is now included in the Danish National Open Access Strategy and the National Research Data Strategy. The Danish Council for Independent Research recommends, and the Novo Nordisk foundation requires an ORCID iD in funding applications. Currently DEFF, a library collaboration funded by several ministries, is sponsoring a national ORCID implementation project with project partners including seven of the eight Danish universities, a consortium of all Danish university colleges and a consortium of research institutions under the Ministry of Culture.[24]

In Australia, according to Arthur Sale of the University of Tasmania, ‘there is an active ORCID activity, and it has been adopted (or recommended) for universal application, but this has not yet reached the status of a mandate by government’ (personal communication, 2 Jan 2016). The Australian ORCID Consortium was launched on 1 January 2016 with 38 organizations (http:// aaf.edu.au/orcid/). The Universities of Sydney, Melbourne, New South Wales, and Queensland, Macquarie University, Griffith University, Queensland University of Technology, La Trobe University and Charles Darwin University and the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) are all members of ORCID. ORCID Working Group of Australia comprising research councils and associations has developed a consortium model for implementing ORCID iDs across the Australian research sector.[25]Funding agencies are also keen to partner with ORCID. Portugal’s Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) mandated the use of ORCID in 2013. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) asks that grantees use ORCID iDs to manage information in their ScienCV system.

Many other funding agencies across the world have also adopted ORCID:[26]

The Swedish Research Council (SRC) mandated the use of ORCID in Spring 2015.
Austrian Science Fund (FWF) has mandated the use of ORCID starting in 2016.
European Commission H2020 Grantee Guidelines recommend that contributors be uniquely identifiable through identifiers which are persistent, non-proprietary, open and interoperable (e.g. through leveraging existing sustainable initiatives such as ORCID).[27]
Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) will mandate the use of ORCID in the next funding cycle.
Autism Speaks, a US-based awareness, advocacy and funding body, requires all investigators and mentors to register with ORCID to obtain a unique iD. This enables Autism Speaks to update one’s funding record and to monitor one’s research progress. Autism Speaks will not consider applications without ORCID accounts for the key personnel.[28]

Publishing platforms such as Aries Editorial Manager, eJournal Press, and ScholarOne have already built-in ORCID support so authors publishing in those journals can create their ORCID iDs through them. PKP is working on developing modules for the Open Journal Systems used by more than 8600 journals.

Research information systems such as Elements, Plum Analytics, PURE, SmartSimple, InfoEd, University Office and Research Master, and the open access repository platforms DSpace, Dryad, EPrints, and VIVO have also built-in ORCID support.

Towards the end of 2015, Altmetrics integrated ORCID with its Explorer apps, and now one can search for Altmetric attention data for all the research outputs associated with one’s ORCID profile and thus scholars can get credit for all their research contributions, including journal articles and participation in social media.

SUPPORT TO ORCID

Right from the beginning, ORCID’s aim was to become completely self-sustaining based on member fees. However, they did have some sponsors and they did take some loans from their own members/stakeholders (http://orcid.org/about/community/ sponsors).

In September 2011, ORCID received an NSF Eager grant of US$ 200 000 via the University of Chicago.[29] The APIs developed with this funding and released in November 2011 could be used by third parties to integrate grant, manuscript or personnel tracking systems with ORCID. This project led to the formal launch of ORCID and its website (http://orcid.org). The philosophy and evolution of ORCID were disseminated through journals such as Nature and EduCAUSE, outreach meetings and social media channels such as twitter.

Seeing its value, a few philanthropic foundations came forward to support ORCID. An award by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to ORCID funded the pilot integration of ORCID identifiers by a group of universities and science and social science professional associations, such as Purdue University and the Society of Neurosciences. This programme supported the collaborative elicitation and documentation of ‘use cases’ and open source code, and established a collaborative venue for disseminating best practices. All projects were completed in December 2014. Partnering institutions have shared integration source code and lessons learnt with the ORCID community through ORCID’s GitHub open source repository and online ‘use cases’, and now serve as reference sites for organizations planning similar integrations.[30]

In April 2015, the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust awarded US$ 3 million to ORCID to develop the infrastructure and capacity to support international adoption and technical integration.[31]

ORCID IN EMERGING AND DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

The National Science Library (NSL) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has taken the lead in China and is taking steps to adopt ORCID nationwide.[32] China fully recognizes the importance of the unique author identifiers, especially so for Chinese authors and the NSL sees the value in an international, open, and researcherdriven person identifier. Scientists in China are willing to work with ORCID to promote it in CAS and in the country. To this purpose, the NSL is enlisting cooperation from Web of Science, the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD), Chinese Social Science Citation Index (CSSCI), CAS Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) Journal Association, University STM Journal Association, and a number of major research and academic libraries. NSL has developed the iAuthor platform, as an easy Chinese front gate to register for an ORCID identifier and to interoperate with Chinese journals, CSCD and others. The NSL iAuthor service was launched in October 2014.[32]

ORCID is yet to pick up in India. As of 15 September 2015, more than 1.5 million ORCID iDs have been assigned. Of these, 14 439 have been registered with an email address that ends in ‘.in’ and 17 048 records where the country is set to India (email communication from ORCID, 29 Jun 2015). That comes to <1.14%. Many authors may be using web mail addresses and we will not be able to identify them as Indian researchers.

ORCID is just starting in Latin America, according to Dominique Babini, Open Access Program Coordinator at the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) (personal communication, 1 Jan 2016). According to Abel Packer, Director of SciELO, ‘ORCID is not yet widely adopted in LA. There is an increasing awareness of it and its role and importance. But, only a few institutions adopted it as an obligatory policy to their affiliates’ (personal communication, 2 Jan 2016). Less than 10% of the authors fill the ORCID field in the submission form in the online manuscript submission/processing services used by SciELO Brazil. But, it will be adopted if funding agencies and journals make it mandatory on their submission systems. A barrier to its wide adoption is that researchers have many options to manage their profiles (personal communication, 2 Jan 2016). The first to join ORCID were:[33] Redalyc, the University of the State of Mexico’s open access platform; CONCYTEC – National Council of Science and Technology in Peru; and UNESP (Sao Paulo State University) in Brazil.

Interest in ORCID has been growing in Africa for some time. In South Africa alone over 3500 researchers have registered and three universities, viz. University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science are ORCID members, as is the National Research Foundation. In all of Africa, there are >7000 registered researchers mostly from South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, Tunis, Ghana, Kenya and Botswana. The cities in Africa that lead in ORCID use are Cairo, Tunis, Lagos, Algiers, Giza, Cape Town, Pretoria and Alexandria.[34]

In the Asia–Pacific region there were 37 members of ORCID[35]as of August 2015, including 13 in Australia, 3 in New Zealand, 6 in Hong Kong, 5 in Taiwan and 4 in Japan. There is one in India—a multinational company providing editing and publishing services—with offices in many countries and does not really qualify to be known exclusively as an Indian entity.

SOME CONCERNS

Some are critical of ORCID. One criticism is that ORCID is not open access and it appears to be a complicated, expensive, proprietary and monopolistic system, and the participation of several commercial publishers makes it a Trojan horse which could eventually lead to strengthening the stranglehold of the publishing industry over scholarly communication. We were alerted to this concern by Thomas Krichel (personal communication, 6 Jul 2015). Krichel ignores the fact that without the participation of large bibliographic databases, ORCID cannot provide the service effectively. Bringing on board Scopus (Elsevier), Web of Science (Thomson Reuters), etc. is not only a clever move but is an absolute necessity.

Many others do not agree with this view. Bilder et al.[16] believe that ORCID conforms to the values of an open scholarly infrastructure organization. Also, as Paglione[36] has put it: ‘One of the core principles of ORCID is that all software we develop will be publicly released under an open source software license approved by the Open Source Initiative. In addition to transparency, releasing our code will improve interoperability and integration with external services, lead to more robust code because more individuals are auditing and testing it, and, with an extended developer community, enable faster code iteration and evolution.’ Haak has also listed the open features of ORCID, viz. it provides free, barrier-free access, it is democratic and transparent, and it is open access.[37]

Another concern is: what if unscrupulous individuals claim authorship on papers that are not theirs, if the ORCID authorship has not been previously claimed by the true author? Is there any safeguard to prevent such a possibility? Can ORCID help prevent fraudulent reviewing?

In the early days, it is possible for someone to claim authorship of papers written by others. But, according to Laure Haak (personal communication, 10 Dec 2015), ‘ORCID is a public resource, and if someone claims erroneously this can be monitored by the community and reported and addressed using ORCID’s dispute procedures (see http://orcid.org/orcid-dispute-procedures). As universities and other employers of researchers are using ORCID to assert affiliation (and funders are asserting awardees also using ORCID), there becomes built a web of trusted data about an individual’s research activities, all with researcher consent.’ Also, as more and more publishers receive ORCID iDs of authors as part of the metadata when authors submit papers, and as Crossref updates the ORCID records, it will reduce unethical claims.

As far as peer-review fraud is concerned, there are attempts to counter it using ORCID.[38] But, these are social problems and technical solutions are not the answer. The fight between good and evil is often a see-saw. However, as the uptake of ORCID gains momentum it will become difficult for such fraudsters to lay claim on others’ works.

There are some reservations though about the costs involved in becoming a member of ORCID. Here is what J.K. Vijayakumar of King Abdullah University, Saudi Arabia, told us: ‘if an institution wants to use ORCID to integrate with their repository, research management systems, etc., the institution needs to become a member (the fees are high and one has to pay even more if ORCID integration is required for more than one system). This needs to be debated and ORCID should bring down the membership fee according to income of the country, so that developing nations can also take part’ (personal communication, 11 Jul 2015). This seems to be a good suggestion. In fact, a member can use one member API credential in many systems. ORCID also provides a substantial discount for small organizations (<US$ 200 000). In addition, affordability is partly why the consortium member model was launched. Haak says: ‘We continue to evaluate membership fees and are starting an initiative for adoption in developing countries in 2016’ (personal communication, 2015).

What we are concerned more is the fact that although the number of live ORCID iDs exceed 2.43 million (as of 29 July 2016), only about 337 000 of them have at least one work (https://orcid.org/statistics). Only about one in five iDs is actually being used.

DISCUSSION

The value of ORCID is evident even in its first 5 years. As Jonathon Kram of the Strategic Planning and Policy Unit at Wellcome Trust says, ‘the ability to uniquely identify contributors is a deceptively simple concept which, if realized, could enable forms of real-time understanding of scientific research that up to now have been extremely costly (if not impossible).’[39]

When the Modern Language Association (MLA) enabled in June 2015 retroactive assigning of ORCID iDs to the nearly two million records in its International Bibliography, which holds the key to language and literary scholarship for more than 90 years, it met an especially critical need in the humanities and arts, where publication types and venues are so diverse, needing more work to be done to create clarity and connect the parts than in the sciences. It would also bring increased recognition and validation of humanities scholarship.[40]

As early as 2012, concerned by the lack of quality, comprehensive data about biomedical researchers, the US NIH recommended the development of a simple, comprehensive tracking system for trainees, and implemented a researcher profile system called the Science Experts Network Curriculum Vitae (SciENcv), and encouraged the adoption of unique, persistent ORCID identifiers for researchers.[41]

ORCID, along with open access and open educational resources, is integral to the open knowledge movement. It supports ‘the transition from science to e-Science, wherein scholarly publications can be mined to spot links and ideas hidden in the ever-growing volume of scholarly literature’.[42]

Such benefits of ORCID adoption will be fully realized only if ORCID iDs are adopted widely across the research community, and if ORCID iDs are integrated within systems of higher educational institutions, funders and publishers.[43]

If research councils such as the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), and Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and funding agencies such as the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and the University Grants Commission (UGC) mandate ORCID iDs for all researchers in all their laboratories and for all applicants for grants, India can make quick progress. Vice chancellors of universities, directors of research institutions, and the governing boards of academies and professional associations and societies could insist on all researchers in their respective institutions registering for an ORCID iD. Scholarly journals published by the science academies, CSIR-NISCAIR, ICAR, ICMR, professional associations, etc. could mandate inclusion of ORCID iDs by all authors at the time of submitting manuscripts. It would help immensely if India were to adopt a manpower tracking system based on ORCID in all areas of science, technology and innovation, similar to that used by NIH.

India has done reasonably well in the area of open educational resources (OER). In particular, the National Programme of Technology Enabled Learning (NPTEL) executed by a consortium of IITs and Indian Institute of Science is highly regarded and is used well. But it took several years of voluntary effort before green open access became acceptable to a small percent of Indian researchers and research institutions, long after it became standard practice in many countries. We hope this time around things will move quickly and many researchers and institutions will adopt ORCID soon.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to Dr L.L. Haak, Alice Meadows, Nobuko Miyairi and Alainna Wrigley of ORCID, Rachel Bruce of Jisc, Thomas Krichel of GESIS and RePEc, Peter Suber of the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Martin Fenner of DataCite, Arthur Sale of University of Tasmania, John Willinsky of Stanford University, Dominique Babini of CLACSO, Abel Packer of SciELO, for answering our questions and providing some valuable information. We are indebted to Subbiah Gunasekaran of the Central Electrochemical Research Institute, Karaikudi, for valuable discussion and for alerting us to some important developments. The comments of two referees were very helpful in rewriting and improving the original text.

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[20] Reimer T. UK ORCID members meeting and launch of Jisc ORCID consortium at Imperial College, London, 28 September 2015, Available at http:// wwwf.imperial.ac.uk/blog/openaccess/2015/10/07/uk-orcid-members-meeting-andlaunch-of-jisc-orcid-consortium-at-imperial-college-london-28th-september-2015/ (accessed on 3 Jan 2016).

[21] Wellcome Trust. Who are you? Recognising researchers with ORCID identifiers, 30 Jun 2015. Available at http://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2015/06/30/who-are-yourecognising-researchers-with-orcid-identifiers/ (accessed on 29 Sep 2015).

[22] National Institute for Health Research. NIHR begins roll out of mandatory ORCID iD requirement, 23 September 2015. Available at nihr.ac.uk/newsroom/featurednews/nihr-begins-roll-out-of-mandatory-orcid-id-requirement/3024 (accessed on 3 Jan 2016).

[23] Meadows A. Italy launches national ORCID implementation, 22 June 2015. Available at http://orcid.org/blog/2015/06/19/italy-launches-national-orcid-implementation (accessed on 3 Jan 2016).

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[25] Meadows A. Australian ORCID consortium officially launched. 16 February 2016. Available at https://orcid.org/blog/2016/02/19/australian-orcid-consortiumofficially-launched (accessed on 20 Feb 2016).

[26] Haak L. Adoption and use by the research community: Focus on funders. Available at http://slideshare.net/ORCIDslides/orcid_adoption_and_use (accessed on 29 Sep 2015).

[27] European Commission. Directorate General for Research & Innovation. Guidelines on open access to scientific publications and research data in Horizon 2020: Version 1.0. Available at http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/ h2020/grants_manual/hi/oa_pilot/h2020-hi-oa-pilot-guide_en.pdf (accessed on 29 Sep 2015).

[28] Autism Speaks. Policy on ORCID integration with Autism Speaks science grants system, Available at autismspeaks.org/science/policy-statements/policyORCID-integration-autism-speaks-science-grants-system (accessed on 3 Jan 2016).

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[31] ORCID receives $3 million grant to build international engagement. Available at http://helmsleytrust.org/news/orcid-receives-3-million-grant-build-internationalengagement (accessed on 29 Sep 2015).

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[35] Miyairi N. ORCID: Building academic trust. Panel discussion on reputation management and research integrity, STM Publishing and China Industry Day, Beijing, 25 August 2015. Available at stm-assoc.org/ 2015_08_25_STM_CAST_Miyairi_ORCID_Industry_Day.pdf (accessed on 29 Sep 2015).

[36] Paglione L. ORCID Blog. Available at http://orcid.org/blog/2013/02/21/orcidopen-source (accessed on 29 Sep 2015).

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[38] Ferguson C, Marcus A, Oransky I. Publishing: The peer-review scam. Nature 2014;515:480–2.

[39] Kram J. ORCID Blog. Available at https://orcid.org/blog/2015/06/26/host-reasonswhy-funders-should-be-investing-orcid-%E2%80%A6 (accessed on 3 Jan 2016).

[40] Taylor LN. MLA (Modern Language Association) International Bibliography launches ORCID App. 2015 Available at http://laurientaylor.org/2015/06/19/news-mlamodern-language-association-international-bibliography-launches-orcid-app/ (accessed on 3 Jan 2016).

[41] Schaffer W. The adoption of ORCID identifiers by funding organizations. Available at slideshare.net/ORCIDSlides/20140423-webinar-schaffer (accessed on 3 Jan 2016).

[42] Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). Metrics cannot replace peer review in the next REF. Available at hefce.ac.uk/news/newsarchive/2015/ Name,104464,en.html (accessed on 3 Jan 2016).

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/eprints-iisc-ernet-october-28-2016-subbiah-arunachalam-madan-muthu-adopting-orcid-as-unique-identifier-will-benefit-all-involved-in-scholarly-communication

Adikavi Nannaya University Telugu Wikipedia Workshop

Pavan Santhosh — 2017-04-16T08:57:21Z

A Telugu Wikipedia introductory workshop was conducted for the students of Adikavi Nannaya University, Rajahmundry between 6- 7 January, 2017.

A two-day Telugu Wikipedia workshop was conducted for the students of Adikavi Nannaya University in Rajahmundry between 6- 7 January, 2017. The participants were post-graduate students of the Telugu Department of the University with a notable gender ratio of 13 male and 21 female participants.

The aim of the workshop was to introduce students to Wikipedia and contributing to Wikipedia projects. They were taught basic Wikipedia editing and the usage of Google's advanced tools. This would also help them create tertiary sources using primary and secondary sources. The students improved articles about their villages using references available on the Internet. The workshop, conducted jointly by CIS-A2K and Telugu Wikipedia community members, was key to increasing the base of Telugu Wikipedia across the Telugu-speaking region, to cities like Rajahmundry. Says User:విశ్వనాధ్.బి.కె., "from initial days, Wikipedia offline activities development is Hyderabad-centric and Wikipedia activities should be done in all areas (of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh). As this event in Adikavi Nannaya University helps in that aspect, I would like to offer all of my effort to these kind of events."

Overall, the event saw the creation 32 new pages on Telugu Wikipedia by 33 newly registered users with 99118 bytes being deleted/ added.

The link to event page on meta can be found here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/adikavi-nannaya-university-telugu-wikipedia-workshop-1

Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation to Host Design Public

praskrishna — 2014-04-04T08:08:10Z

The conclave in its 5th edition will feature Aam Aadmi Party members Rajmohan Gandhi and Somnath Bharti along with Sunil Abraham in conversation with Dr. Aditya Sood about different approaches through citizen centric governance.

The information was posted on BusinessWire India on March 11, 2014. Source : Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation

Adianta School of Leadership and Innovation is setting up the stage for yet another conclave to establish a dialogue around innovation with ‘Design Public’. The key aspect of the conclave would be a dialogue between Raj Mohan Gandhi, Member- Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) & Grandson of Mahatma Gandhi; Somnath Bharti, Former Law Minister Delhi, Member- Aam Aadmi Party (AAP); Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet & Society and Dr. Aditya Dev Sood, Founder & CEO, CKS about different approaches through citizen centric governance.

The fifth edition of the Design Public Conclave which will be held on Friday, March 14^th, 2014 at Vihara Campus, is being produced by the Center for Knowledge Societies, the Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation, the Startup Tunnel, the Bihar Innovation Lab, and the Financial Innovation Alliance, in partnership and with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Grameen Foundation, CGAP, UNDP's GCEPA and the Social Innovation Exchange (SIX).

Over the past three years, Design Public has emerged as the premier location for high-level conversations about the public role and social impact of design and innovation in India. It has attracted some erudite and high profile speakers and discussants across regions, society and sectors of industry. The fifth edition of Design Public will focus on “Social Innovation through Partnership with Private Sector” and “The Elements of Governance Innovation” as both are relevant in present day context. The discussions will set the stage for recommendations and suggestions around promotion of social innovation through new partnerships between the social and private sectors, promoting social enterprises and beneficial social consequences of private sector activity with specific focus on the new companies bill and how it brings centre stage new opportunities for promoting social innovation. Focus on “The Elements of Governance Innovation” will focus on the importance of distinguishing governance innovation from policy work, the key constituencies involved in governance innovation and how better collaboration can create more meaningful impact.

The conclave will see two Keynotes touching both the aspects by Esko Kilpi, Writer and Theorist of the Networked Society and Arndt Hussar, UNDP-GCPSE, Singapore, respectively. Apart from the Keynotes, there would be other speakers which include Ada Wong, Chair, SIX, Hong Kong; Nehal Sanghavi, Advisor, USAID, India; Rajesh Sawhney, Founder, Global Superangels Fund, India; Louis Pulford, Director of SIX (Social Innovation Exchange) and Prof. M.P. Ranjan, Design Chair, CEPT University.

Apart from the keynotes, the conclave will also feature two working groups and three breakout sessions followed by presentations from each breakout and a dialogue for framing conclusions and charting next steps.

The working groups will focus on designing a Social Innovation Exchange for India and building an action plan for Governance Innovation respectively. The breakouts will be explaining Open Data in the Indian context, opening out closed systems of Governance and developing start-up opportunities in Governance Innovation.

Other key participants for the fifth edition of Design Public conclave include Abhimanyu Nowhar, Founder, The Kiba Design; Ambrish Arora, Head, Lotus Design; Balasubramanian Munuswamy, Private Sector Development Advisor, Department for International Development (DIFD), British High Commission; Chakshu Roy, Heads, Outreach Initiatives, PRS Legislative Research; Chandni Ohri, CEO, Grameen Foundation, India; Daniel Radcliffe, Senior Program Officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Gautam Gandhi, New Business Development for Emerging Markets, Google; Harsh Srivastava, Chief Operating Officer, Centre of Civil Society; Ishan Khosla, Founder, Ishan Khosla Design; Jatin Modi, Founder, FrogIdeas, India; Karan Malik, Associate, Advisory Research, Dasra; Lysander Menezes, Team Leader, Maternal Child Health & Nutrition, PATH; Namit Arora, Writer & Activist; Nehal Sanghavi, Advisor, USAID, India; Rajesh Khati, Founder & Principal Consultant, Clearway Advisors; Ramanjit Chima, Senior Policy Analyst, Google; Sanjay Rishi, President, MCS, Usha International Ltd.; Shweta Banerjee, CGAP, India; Soaib Grewal, Founder, Bold Capital, India; Somnath Bharti, Member-AAP and Former Law Minister, Government of Delhi; Suhas Mhaskar, Senior General Manager & Head, Mahindra and Mahindra Ltd.; Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Researcher, The Sarai Programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and Usha Alexander, Writer and Instructional Designer.

About Design Public

Over the past three years, Design Public has emerged as the premier location for high-level conversations about the public role and social impact of design and innovation in India. It has attracted speakers and discussants from all regions of the world, from all estates of society and from diverse sectors of industry. Out of the conversations held here, many new initiatives have emerged, including the Bihar Innovation Lab, the Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation, among others. There has been wide coverage of the themes and ideas emerging from Design Public in the media and blogosphere, including in the New York Times, Economic Times, Times of India, and Mint Newspaper. High value participants in the past have included Arun Maira (Planning Commission), Sam Pitroda (National Innovation Council), Geoff Mulgan (NESTA, UK), Ashok Alexander (BMGF), Rohini Nilekani (Arghyam), Yamini Aiyer (Accountability Initiative), Ashwin Mahesh (Lok Satta Party), Samanth Subramanaian (Writer), Vish Palekar (Mahindra Group), Jeby Cherian (IBM), Riku Makela (Tekes, FI), among many others.

About Adianta

The Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation promotes a radical and empowering educational approach that promotes Learning by Doing. It is a collaborative effort between some of the world’s leading innovation organizations, including the School of Design at the Technische Universiteit Delft (Netherlands), NESTA (UK), The Social Innovation Exchange (Global), and the Center for Knowledge Societies (India). With a distinguished team of advisors, international faculty and a global network of over 100 mentors, the Adianta School provides an unprecedented quality of international education right here in India.

For News Release background on Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation click here

Media Contact Details

Abhishek Shivam, Greyhound Neo, +919582199990 , ashivam@greyhoundgroup.com Priyanka Ahuja, Brand Manager, Adianta School for Leadership and Innovation, outreach@adianta.org

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/businesswire-

AdaCamp Bangalore: "Nothing could be more open and encouraging than this"

praskrishna — 2015-02-12T01:53:43Z

I can say this conference was the most truly touched feminist endeavor I have ever witnessed or thought of. An inspiration to last through. — Rupali Talwatkar.

Rohini Lakshané delivered a session on digital security. For more info see the details on Ada Initiative website

Session on Imposter Syndrome:

Impostor syndrome is a common reaction to doing publicly visible and publicly criticised work like that done in open technology and culture. Impostor Syndrome is the feeling that you aren't actually qualified for the work you are doing and will be discovered as a fraud. It is prevalent among women in open tech/culture, many of whom have been socialised to value other's opinion of their work above their own, and to do things "by the book."
http://adainitiative.org/what-we-do/impostor-syndrome-training/

Session on Open Street Maps:
https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/yAxa2Kwkfm

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/ada-camp-bangalore

Ada Lovelace Edit-a-thon 2014

praskrishna — 2014-10-13T06:30:08Z

A Wikipedia edit-a-thon is being held at Urban Solace on October 14, 2014 from 10.00 a.m. to 4.00 p.m. The event is being organized by IndiaBioScience in partnership with the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team. CIS-A2K will conduct the first three edit-a-thons.

In India, Science as a discipline is subject to many of the same gender issues as it is worldwide - women scientists are fewer in number than men, they occupy fewer positions of power, and face distinct issues by virtue of their gender and the accompanying societal pressures. Women Scientists in India also tend to be less visible than their male counterparts, and public awareness of Indian Women Scientists is low.

IndiaBioScience will be organising a series of public events to raise the profile of women scientists on one of the most-popular online encyclopaedias - Wikipedia. At these events, participants will be encouraged to create and complete profiles of Indian Women in Science.

The last of these events, on October 14 coincides with Ada Lovelace Day, an international day to celebrate the achievements of women in Science, Technology and Math.

To participate sign up below or click here (http://www.indiabioscience.org/content/women-science-wiki-edit-thon)

Lunch and snacks will be provided.

At the venue, the events will begin with a short, hands-on introduction to Wiki editing. Participants can then go on to pick the scientist they would like to work on. There will be an interaction session with a guest Woman Scientist around lunch, with a discussion of issues commonly faced by women in science. In the afternoon session, participants can continue working on the Wiki pages, with a break for tea. Participants are requested to bring their laptops. We have a few desktops available at Saturday's venue for those who cannot do so.

Online participants can find us via Google Hangout. Chat with us or dial in for interactions, questions, help or simply to socialize.

Speaker: Rohini Godbole

See the event page on Wikipedia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/ada-lovelace-edit-a-thon-2014

Access to Rare Books Made Easy

praskrishna — 2014-12-27T01:56:57Z

Rare Odia books that are out of print and not easily accessible on the internet, will now be available at the click of the mouse. In a bid to make them available online, the Odia Wikipedia community last week launched WikiSource, an Odia e-library and a sister project of Odia Wikipedia that has been trying to popularise use of Odia language on the Internet since 2002.

The article by Diana Sahu was published in the New Indian Express on December 5, 2014

The online library has 69 books by authors Jagannath Mohanty, Upendra Bhanja, Fakir Mohan Senapati, Gopabandhu Das, Baladeva Rath and Ram Das. Besides, the complete volume of Bhagwad Gita in Odia language is available on WikiSource.

The project has been implemented by Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to knowledge programme. Odia Wikipedian Subhashish Panigrahi, also a programme officer of the Centre for Internet and Society, said work on digitisation of the books was started in April this year by a team of 12 Wikipedians, comprising mostly students and working professionals.

Apart from them, 50 tribal students and nine faculty members of Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) helped them with the digitisation job. As most of the books were typed in Akruti font - a proprietary Indian Script Code for Information Interchange (ISCII) compliant font - the font was converted to Unicode text type to make the books searchable and accessible universally in all mobile and web platforms.

In the first phase, 11 books focusing on children’s literature, travelogue and biographies of noted people from Odisha by eminent Odia author Jagannath Mohanty were digitised. Subsequently, works of other authors were added to the e-library and made available on the internet with open access through free licence.

Subhashish said the WikiSource project was started in 2013 as an incubator project. It went through a tough process of being accessed by the Wikimedia Language Committee and Wikimedia Foundation’s board before being released last week. “There are several precious books that are out of print and not easily accessible on the internet. So we thought of digitising them and taking them to the masses. Apart from the 69 books, 81 of seven Odia authors that were already scanned and digitised by Bhubaneswar-based voluntary organisation, Srujanika, have been re-licensed and added to the library,” he said. Srujanika has digitised 740 old Odia magazines and books so far.

Generally a technique called Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is used for digitising scanned books, which currently is in testing phase in Odia. “Faculty member of ITER in Bhubaneswar Ajit Nayak along with his students have rectified the bugs and made character recognition more accurate.

But because of problems with OCR, the books had to be re-typed by the students of KISS on Odia Wikisource, Subashish added. Old books apart, books by contemporary authors like Debiprasanna Pattanayak, Ramakrushna Nanda, Subrat Prusty, Bharat Majhi and Nirmala Kumari Mohapata, and many other authors have been taken up for digitisation by Odia WikiSource team. Odia WikiSource is now live at or.wikisource.org.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/new-indian-express-december-5-2014-diana-sahu-access-to-rare-books-made-easy

Access To Knowledge/Programme Plan

praskrishna — 2012-09-30T13:25:14Z

Pursuant to the announcement made on July 30, 2012 and as reflected in the FAQ accompanying the announcement, the India Program will become a project of the Access to Knowledge (A2K) program of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) an established non-profit organisation working in India whose own goals and objectives are in close alignment with that of the Wikimedia movement.

Context to the CIS A2K programme plan

Between 80 to 120 million Indians have Internet access, and by 2015 that number is expected to increase to 237 million. Correspondingly, between 400 and 700 million Indians have mobile phones, and the number that have mobile-data access to the Internet is increasing exponentially. India is a country with tremendous knowledge resources to contribute to humankind. While the majority off Indians face income-related technological barriers against accessing and contributing to the global storehouse of knowledge, there are a significant number of people in the country who have both the capacity and ability to do both.

For the Wikimedia movement, India represents a largely untapped opportunity to dramatically expand our impact and move toward our vision of a world where everyone can freely share in – and contribute to - the sum of human knowledge. Although the Indian population makes up about 20% of humanity, Indians account for only 4.7% of global Internet users, and India represents only 2.0% of global pageviews and 1.6% of global page edits on Wikimedia's sites. Despite such a disproportionately small presence on Wikimedia, English Wikipedia, our flagship project, ranks in the top ten of the most visited websites in India. We also have Wikipedia projects in 20 Indic languages, which will become increasingly important as the next 100 million Indians to come onto the Internet, given that they are likely to be increasingly using the Internet in languages other than English. Demographically, Indic languages represent a good growth opportunity since estimates suggest only about 150 million of the total Indian population of 1.2 billion have working fluency in English.

In 2010, the Wikimedia movement developed its first strategic plan and set India as a priority geography for growth and investment. At the conclusion of the strategy process, the Wikimedia Foundation created a Global Development team that immediately started laying the groundwork for the India Program. In 2012, the strategic plan was updated and revised to reflect experiences from the initial phase of the India Program and changed realities on the ground.

Objectives

Support the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects (e.g. donations of encyclopaedias and other useful texts, education partnerships and other institutional partnerships) Support India-focused efforts to improve quality of India-relevant content on Indic language and English Wikimedia projects (e.g. university outreach, institutional partnerships and India-relevant thematic contribution campaigns) Drive and complement access to free knowledge across India through alternative technological means (e.g. mobile-based Wikipedia and offline Wikipedia) Help the Indian community and chapter share experiences and tell their stories to the wider Indian and global communities within the Wikimedia movement Generate and document lessons from activities in India that can inform the work of Indian communities and similar programs in other countries Support the Wikimedia community on an on-going basis as and when needed and possible, and by cross-pollinating ideas, encouraging volunteer initiatives and transferring best practices. Partner with formal and informal groupings within the Wikimedia movement in India, for example, the Wikimedia India chapter, language communities, WikiProject India, etc.

Impact

In measuring impact, it is important to differentiate between outputs and outcomes. Desired outputs of the CIS-A2K programme are described in more detail in the sections that follow, and are likely to be re-callibrated, given the customised, changing and experimental nature of the work. Outcomes, on the other hand, relate to expected/desirable impacts that the work seeks to achieve. Both outputs and outcomes can only be achieved through a cooperative effort involving the CIS-A2K programme team, the Wikimedia India chapter, the Wikimedia community, and the other important community groupings that exist online and offline. In other words, the goals can be met if

Desired outputs:
To expand the Indian editing community to 5,000 active editors by June 2015, with at least 1,000 active editors in the Indic language projects. To enable the building of Wikipedia projects (and sister projects such as Wiktionary and Wikisource) while keeping in mind reasonable quality, and have 5 Indic language Wikipedias reaching 50,000 articles, and 5 more reaching 25,000 articles, while also enabling 5 Indic language communities to have 100 active editors, and 5 more to have 50 active editors. To expand Wikipedia readership to 100 million unique visitors per month by June 2015. To ensure Wikipedia is accessible to all literate Indians through mobile and/or offline platforms. To expand the base of India-related articles on English Wikipedia from 115,000 to 165,000 by June 2015, and to halve India-related stubs in the same period.

Desired outcomes:
Foster a strong relationship with and within the Indian Wikimedia community through transparency and communication, and by providing support for community-led activities and facilitating community participation and ownership Expand the Indic language editing community and build interest in Indic language Wikimedia projects Grow high-quality Wikipedia projects (and sister projects such as Wiktionary and Wikisource) Expand Wikipedia readership in India including on mobile and offline platforms Grow India-focused articles across Wikimedia projects.

Program goals

Catalyst Project Approach

The India Program started out as a partnership with the Indian Wikimedia community, which includes the Wikimedia India chapter. The initiative was intended as a means through which the Wikimedia Foundation can help the community grow, improve and expand the projects. This was an experimental effort, as the Wikimedia movement does not have a set of proven programs that can guarantee the growth of a community or project and the India Program was the first catalyst project being undertaken by the movement (further efforts have since got underway in the Middle-East and Brazil). Subsequent to the India Program becoming a project of CIS' A2K program, the aim is to identify pilots that work in achieving impact goals. This will be useful for sustaining the long-term success of the projects and will provide guidance for the development of other languages.

Catalyst Project Approach

Specifically, the A2K Team will focus on testing pilots that tackle the following challenges:

Building editor communities of sufficient critical size to accelerate and sustain growth in Indic languages
Connecting the Wikimedia community to new networks, building awareness of the Wikimedia projects and how they work
Building partnerships with educational and other groups to encourage new users to join the community as editors and content contributors
Encouraging editors of English Wikipedia in India, and strengthening coverage of India-relevant topics therein
Reaching communities with limited Internet connectivity to create access to Wikipedia's educational content

The A2K team will answer the following general questions in its pilot work that will help inform program design in India and in other geographies where the Wikimedia movement is active:

Editing growth: Are there certain types of proactive programming that work well in garnishing editorship in India? Indic languages and English: Is there a difference in strategies/opportunities for growth between Indic language communities and the EN:WP community in India? Program evaluation: Why are the programs in India successes or failures? Pilot testing and learning: Why do some program pilots succeed and others struggle? Community partnership: What is the best way to partner with the community in the individual pilots and the overall program? Ability to replicate in India: What are the features/programs that have succeeded and can succeed elsewhere in India? Ability to replicate internationally: What is replicable from the India experience? What are the cultural factors that should be accounted for before expanding? Capacity: Is it possible to maintain the program's activities within the volunteer community or is staff capacity needed? Return on Investment: Is the financial investment justified by the results of the program? Scale: Are pilots that are being tested scalable within a particular community, and adoptable by other language communities?

Current year plan - July 2012-June 2013

General community support and communications

The A2K team will provide support to the Indian Wikimedia community, which includes the Wikimedia India chapter, on various community-led activities, including outreach events across the country, meetups, contests, conferences, and connections to GLAMs and other institutions. This support will extend to all formal and informal groupings within the Wikimedia movement. Henceforth, requests of support from the community and the chapter will be managed transparently and publicly so that the A2K team can meet expectations, keeping in mind that not all community events will seek A2K program support, and that the A2K program will not always be able to support all requests made. In general, community support is intended to solve a problem or help or add to an existing community or chapter initiative; the A2K team will provide any level of reasonable help as needed.

The A2K team will also provide services to the community with regard to intra- and inter-community communications--most visibly through the quarterly Indian community newsletter, Wikipatrika, and also through direct efforts to cross-pollinate ideas and make connects between projects. The team will support the community to tell its story on the global Wikimedia blog, Wikimedia.in, Wikipedia Village pumps and use all available channels to reach out to the community. The team also will build a formal public relations plan that will advocate the values of the movement and encourage new editors. In all cases, the communication efforts will be such that they stay in facilitation/support mode, allowing full ownership and participation by the community.

Indic language community building

The India Program began work on Indic language community building in October 2011. This area is a top priority of the A2K team, as Wikimedia's reach in India will always be limited by language barriers. The Indic language projects remain small, with the most successful having fewer than 50,000 articles and fewer than 100 active editors on a monthly basis. The primary challenge is to strengthen communities to build and sustain each Indic language project. To date, community building has focused on working closely with some really small but promising project communities (some with fewer than five editors) to help them take the initial steps to expand their communities. This will entail supporting the organization and design of outreach events, projects and pilots to aid the community in catalyzing activity. See Indic Language projects for more info on recent and current activities.

Over the next year, Indic community building will continue to focus on deep engagement with 7-10 Indic project communities, with the addition of systematic digital outreach pilots focused on encouraging new editor engagement. Digital outreach represents a powerful channel to invite and encourage new editors, especially given the increasing readership of various projects in India. The current reader base is the most logical place to foster new editors. A combination of geo-targeted banners, linking to online tutorials and other training material, supported by online help points such as the Teahouse, will be piloted in an Indic language and then rolled out to other languages as well as the English Wikipedia community in India. Digital outreach will be conducted in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation's newly established Editor Growth and Contribution Program.

Community building will be done by:

Encouraging communication between editors through establishing connections between editors, facilitating meet-ups and encouraging on-wiki discussions on talk pages or forums such as village pumps
Organising collaboration amongst editors through Wikiprojects that are either subject-specific or task-specific (an example of this process can be seen in the Wikiproject to create and improve articles of the 80 most-read medical topics on English Wikipedia that is now active in 5 different Indic languages--Assamese, Bangla, Odia, Telugu and Marathi)
Cross-pollinating ideas across communities by sharing experiences and success (or otherwise) stories in relevant forums such as the various village pumps, as illustrated in this example for Hindi
Supporting Indic language community events such as the Malayalam conference, Sangamothsavam, held at Kollam in May 2012. The A2K team will also offer support to larger events such as Wikiconference, the national conference of Wikimedians in India, but this will be a secondary focus as priority will be placed on Indic-specific activities.

Content addition/donation in Indic languages

Though the A2K team will work with Indian content in all languages, particular emphasis will be placed on generating and improving content in Indic languages. The team will work to find content that is relevant and useful to the Wikimedia movement that is (a) already in the public domain and (b) contributed to the movement under an acceptable copyright license. Such content will include, but not be limited to, dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopedias and any other encyclopedia-like compilations. The rationale for making content addition/donation a key part of the A2K program work (with the full consent and engagement of the relevant Wikimedia communities involved) is that many smaller Wikipedias need a 'shot in the arm' of content to create sufficient momentum in the projects. In English and other European-language Wikipedias, bot-created content (an integral part of the growth of these Wikipedias in their early years) was possible because sufficient electronic/digital resources existed at the time outside of Wikipedia. For many Indic languages (and indeed, India-related topics in any language), the same is not necessarily true, and content addition/donation may be seen as a necessary intervention--it can be likened to performing the work of a bot in the physical world, with physical texts.

A precedent for content addition/donation exists in the gift of an encyclopedia that the government of the state of Kerala contributed to the Wikimedia movement in December 2008. The gift was received by Jimmy Wales on behalf of the movement and is in the process of being integrated to Malayalam Wikipedia.

New editor cultivation with campaigns on Indian topic areas on English Wikipedia

English Wikipedia is a global resource of nearly 4 million articles. However, only around 115,000 articles (or less than 2.9%) of all articles directly cover topics of relevance in India, and 60,000 of those articles are stubs or articles of poor quality. There is a tremendous opportunity to deepen contributions on India-related topics including areas such as Indian history, geography, law, public policy, politics, art, culture, contributions to the sciences, popular culture, etc.

Over the coming year, in partnership with the Indian Wikipedia community, the Wikimedia India chapter, other groupings (such as WikiProject India) and appropriate national or regional institutions, the CIS A2K team develop campaigns to promote contribution to Wikipedia on specific topic areas. The initial campaigns will involve focused pilots to develop approaches to supporting and cultivating new editors with strong content knowledge. Partnerships will be explored with interest groups outside the existing Wikimedia community to document and celebrate these interests, which could be anything Indian, from efforts that fall under the work of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs), like handicrafts and art, to movies, cricket, history, etc.

Pilot programs

In general, the bulk of the work of the A2K program team will be to run controlled and well-designed pilot programs with the full engagement of the communities involved. These will be developed and carried out in addition to projects focusing on goals A to D. The A2K team will actively design and implement new pilots on the basis of desired impacts and stated goals as outlined through this document. To borrow a phrase from the software development world, the idea behind these pilots will be to continually ensure better design, better engagement and therefore greater chances of success, and to maintain a healthy degree of innovation and experimentation that will allow us, in some cases, to 'fail fast, fail early'.

Built in to the program structure is a speedy evaluation of these pilots that will enable us to document learnings from less successful projects and expand and scale-up more successful attempts. For instance, the India Program, in partnership with the Global Education Program, conducted a pilot project between June-November 2011 with three universities in Pune. The pilot aimed to generate useful content for English Wikipedia and provide lessons for the future growth of education programs within India. The project failed to generate useful content and created significant costs for a variety of reasons, but a thorough evaluation of the pilot was conducted and reported on publicly, and many lessons were learned that will inform future strategies of projects in the same genre. For example, in the coming years, subsequent phases will identify scalable approaches to working with professors and students while taking into account the limitations that were evident in the first attempt; focus will be placed on shifting the design away from English Wikipedia toward Indic languages; work will only be added to Indic language Wikipedias or English Wikipedia if it is of an acceptable quality; students’ training will be made more rigorous; greater and more consistent support from Campus Ambassadors will be provided; and any subsequent project phases will be discussed with the community/ies involved in order to ensure greater community participation in the project right from the outset.

In another instance, the India Program team began two small projects on Facebook in April focused on supporting new editors in English and cultivating community connections and new editors in Odia, as part of a social media pilot. Through these projects, we have learned that social media requires considerable efforts on the part of not just a program team, but instead a whole community. Consequently, in order to succeed, the A2K team will continue to actively engage in the space, and work towards making a cohesive, productive social media space across platforms that is driven and populated by community members, including the chapter, who are already using social media as an extension of their Wikimedia work. One potential pilot project that can work with broad community involvement is an India-focused virtual apprenticeship, building on the Teahouse project.

Approach to measuring results and evaluation

As the work that is being done by the A2K team is of an experimental nature, it is critical that there are clear objectives, robust program design, strong measurement techniques, rigorous documentation, ongoing performance improvement, constant community capacity building and periodic rigorous outside evaluation. Every substantive initiative of the A2K team will have associated pilot designs which will be publicly and regularly developed with and reported to the community. These measures will serve to achieve five objectives:

Increased transparency with the community and chapter so that there is both visibility as well as ownership (and more active involvement of as wide a cross-section of community members as possible)
Discipline of detailed program design to improve the odds of success--especially in the context of the uncharted waters of virtually everything the India Program will be undertaking--with a clear understanding that for any set of experiments, there will be failure and success, though effort will be put towards decreasing failure and increasing success
Facilitation of transfer of capability and best practices within a community, across Indic languages and with communities beyond the India-centric ones
Accountability to community and donors so that a prudent balance is maintained between impact and resources
Fostering of a spirit of learning and continuous improvement, which can only happen if there is detailed and public documentation, communication and training, and an understanding and acceptance that failures will happen with any given set of experiments and that the important thing is to minimise them as well as learn from them.

The A2K team will be supported by a team of five people who will be employees of CIS out of offices in Delhi and Bangalore. The team will be managed by a Programme Director, and consist of individuals working on participation, Indic languages, communication and community and programme support.

Budget

The first year of operations will be supported by a grant from WMF to be administered by CIS for a total of INR 11,000,000. The budget will be spent on team salaries, travel, community events, merchandise for volunteers, and other services as needed.

Read the original published by the Wikimedia Foundation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan

Access to Knowledge Workshop @ NMAMIT, Karkala Taluk, Karnataka

praskrishna — 2012-12-19T07:20:31Z

The Centre for Internet & Society in collaboration with Metawing Technologies (P) Ltd. is organizing a Wikipedia workshop at NMAMIT, Karkala Taluk, Karnataka on December 21, 2012, from 9.30 a.m. to 1.00 p.m.

Over 100 students are expected to participate in this workshop. The primary aim of the workshop is to educate them about Wikipedia in Indian languages and tell them how they can contribute to Wikipedia.

CIS is willing to bear the travelling expense for upto two wikipedians to and from Bangalore (or any other place in Karnataka that is close to Karkala).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/a2k-workshop-at-nmamit

Access to Knowledge Work Plan: Synopsis of Feedback by Wikipedians

nitika — 2013-06-05T05:39:31Z

The Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team shared its annual work plan with the larger Wikipedia community. Over the last one month, Access to Knowledge team members were involved in receiving feedback from community members over mailing lists, private emails, Wikimedia Meta, IRC, and one-on-one conversations. In this post, we are sharing a brief summary of the feedback received.

Odia

by Arjun Rao C.
Village/Block/District project in Telugu Wikipedia was not useful for growing Wikipedia, as even five years after stubs were created using a bot, large percentage of articles never grew into regular articles. It is better to take the top down approach of district articles and then based on that experience, expanding to include Block/Village articles.

Kannada

by Arjun Rao C.
Recently we had a press- Wikimedia panel discussion as part of Telugu Wikipedia Celebration in April 2013 at Hyderabad. I also made attempts to do wiki academies for Jouranlists in the past few years in Telugu and Kannada. Based on what I understand, journalists are always pressed for time and while it will be useful for them to know about Wikipedia, they may not turn out to be editors. At best they will be able to provide a good coverage for Wikipedia events. It is better to target journalism training schools and incorporate Wikipedia during their course, as a way to hone their skills while helping Wikipedia. Also my experience with engineering colleges is not that great for promoting Non English Wikipedia’s. Engineering colleges provide is good computing infrastructure. If we can get the non-engineering students to utilize that infrastructure or provide alternate computing infrastructure that can be very helpful.

by Sharihareswara (WMF)
One additional institution to perhaps partner with: the Mysore Folklore Museum.

Konkani

by Frederick Noronha

There is definite interest in a Konkani Wikipedia, but we seem to have hit an air pocket due to lack of interest.
There is a need to build two communities (i) the literary community, who has the content (ii) the tech guys, who can sort out keyboard and other issues -- or popularise available solutions being used by other same-script groups. As of now, there is no bridge between the two.
Volunteering needs some priming. Maybe we should work with a handful of volunteers who are willing to convert the basic strings needed to set up a Wikipedia. I've already been working (at the personal level) with Isidore Dantas, urging him to help with it... and he has been doing a good job (Romi-script Konkani).
Instead of getting caught up with contentious issues like which script is official or the most suited, in my view it would be helpful to build Wikipedia for at least the main three scripts (Kannada, Roman and Devanagari) and let all coexist. The dialectical differences that exist between different scrips makes for difficulties in machine translation and differing comfort levels to use scripts which one is not used to.
Some institutions have been approached too by various quarters (Goa Konkani Academy, Dalgado Konkani Academy in Panjim, Goa University staff) but unless we get something actually going to show, it would be hard to convince people to start volunteering. For a number of reasons, I'd think that Konkani writers are often less computer-savvy than writers of other Indian languages... It's now changing, but still...

Konkani

by Outofindia
Please add St Aloysius College Managlore as an institution where we could consider having workshops like we did at the Nirmala Institute in Goa. I will help set it up. As Frederick suggests, we could have all the three script tracks (Kannada, Roman and Devanagari)and working together in a physical space will probably be helpful.

Bangla

by Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay
<http://tagoreweb.in/>, SNLTR's hosted instance and <http://sarat-rachanabali.becs.ac.in/> are limited in their utility that they provide no means of using the text as a corpus or, trainer. These are efforts worthy of appreciation. However, providing the means for others to re-use the content as opposed to passive browser based viewing is equally important.

I hope your assessment included that fact. Plus, I am always wary when I read statements like "SNLTR has established that Unicode 5.0 and above as the standard that can be adopted for different e-governance applications and is also in parity with the international practice and standard". In my limited understanding of how standardization does happen, this is not the case.

by Ragib Hasan
That's a nice plan. One thing I'd recommend is to get media involved (perhaps you already have that in the plan, sorry if I'm just repeating it). In particular, you need to get the local Bengali language media (newspaper, TV) involved so that they publish news reports on Wikipedia.

In Bangladesh, it was not easy at the start to get people interested. It took a good media campaign in Bengali language newspapers to get people interested. Also, you should get in touch with the Bengali language blogging community in India (if there is one) and try to get them involved.

By the way, the number of native speakers cited at the start of the article is vastly underestimated .... Bangladesh alone has 160 million native speakers, plus at least half of that in West Bengal.

by Dwaipayan Chakraborti
As Ragib mentioned, local media is important. Do we have any plan on this already? Anyone in touch with media? Or knows anybody? Jayanta nath may be of help.

by Jayanta Nath
English news media had already reported about Bengali Wikipedia few times. But Local Bengali news media (Anandabazar, Bartaman, Eisomy, Pratidin, Ajkaal,) no response at all and no interest about Bengali Wikipedia. I had tried with my personal level of contact. All Bengali news print media want business from Wikipedia, then only they can report about Bengali Wikipedia. Anyone in this mailing list in touch with Bengali media for fresh contact?

Overall Languages

by Abhinavgarule
Concept of Wikipedia Student Partners:- Wiki Student Partners are students from colleges who will help students in solving their queries and keeping follow ups of “How to edit on Wikipedia?” Can we start this wiki student partner concept?? In this pilot project??

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/access-to-knowledge-work-plan-synopsis-of-feedback-by-wikipedians

Access To Knowledge Work Plan (April 2013 - June 2014)

T Vishnu Vardhan — 2013-06-10T14:20:06Z

This page is created to share CIS-A2K's Annual Work Plan (2013-2014) for Indian language Wikimedia projects. The main objective of this document is to present a detailed plan with projection of outcomes and expected impact of the A2K programme activities. The document has been made in consultation with various stakeholders and keeping in mind the objectives, opportunities and challenges faced by each of the Indian language Wikimedia projects. Feel free to share any feedback.

Language Area Work Plans

Telegu

Odia

Kannada

GOM (Konkani)

Bengali

Overall Support Across Indian Language Communities

Pilot Project - Performing Arts in India

Learning and Evaluation

Introductory note

Context

The Wikimedia Foundation has approved a grant of ₹26,000,000 to the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bangalore to expand their Access to Knowledge (A2K) program in India; of this, ₹11,000,000 has been released. The purpose of the grant is to enable the A2K team to work with the Wikimedia community of volunteers in India to expand on Wikimedia’s Indic-language free-knowledge projects. In addition, the grant aims to generate improvements in India-relevant free knowledge in Wikimedia’s English projects, and the wider distribution of Wikimedia’s free knowledge within India.

Objective

The main objective of this document is to present a detailed Annual Work Plan for 2013–14, setting out the expected outcomes and impact of the A2K program activities. The overall objectives of the A2K Team are here.

Methodology

In putting together this Work Plan the A2K team has, over the last two months extensively engaged with various stakeholders. These include a) some Wikimedia India Community members across various Indian-language Wikimedia projects; b) some English-language Wikimedia community members from India; c) Wikimedia India chapter executive committee; d) some potential institutional partners; e) a few like-minded advocates of free knowledge; f) A2K Program Adviser Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana; and g) a few of the Wikimedia Foundation staff.

A draft of each of the language plan will be shared with the particular language community through respective language Wikipedia village pumps, mailing lists; feedback will be collected in finalizing the plan.

A2K’s method of work

A2K principally sees itself as working hand-in-hand with the Indian Wikimedia community and the Wikimedia India chapter, and with all formal and informal groupings within the Wikimedia movement in India. A2K will mostly engage in catalytic kind of work; however, depending on the requirements of each language-area, the A2K team may also undertake the hands-on implementation of some activities that would otherwise be done by the community. The planned A2K program activities are mostly in the south and south-east of India, and it makes better programmatic sense to have the A2K team located in Bangalore. This will not only save the A2K program from relatively larger overhead spending for the project (which could be productively used for programmatic work) but will enable the A2K team to be more in touch with the Wikimedia India community and in proactively undertaking collaborative activities with the community on the ground. Thus the entire A2K team will relocate to Bangalore and work out of the existing CIS office. Please kindly note that the A2K team will hire a new space in Bangalore, once the work plan is finalized, and the intention is that this space will be open to free use by the WM India community and chapter alike.

How to read this Annual Work Plan

This plan is not set in stone and will be periodically (right now quarterly) reviewed and revised. The intention of this Work Plan is to continually ensure better design and better engagement. The broader aspects of the plan have been outlined here. Thus this document is more towards evolving a sense of granularity of the A2K team’s work along with micro level outcome and impact metrics.

We have worked towards developing an Annual Work Plan that is language-specific. The A2K team has not adopted ONE single model, because we believe that each language area has a) specific strengths that we need to build on; b) particular needs for support that we could offer; and c) specific challenges that require localized solutions. Thus there are chances that you might see repetitions in the strategies mentioned across language areas.

Please note that the A2K team has some language area plans worked out in greater detail than others. This is mainly because we intend to prioritize working on five language areas during the coming year. This does not mean that we will not support other language areas/communities, but our engagement will be activity/project-specific, based on requests made to the A2K team by the community. The A2K team will continue its efforts in actively exploring to include a few more language areas, and will share such plans after they reach a certain stage.

Risk and mitigation

The message that comes across, after a cursory glance at Indian-language Wikipedias, is that there is a huge potential to increase the number of editors, especially active editors, along with the expansion of article entries. On one hand, unfortunately there is no fool-proof formula or plan that either the Wikimedia India community, Wikimedia India chapter or A2K can immediately bank on. This does not mean, on the other hand, that there are no ideas, experiences, learnings and failures, that can inform a strategy. An important point is that what we (the community, WMI chapter, WMF and A2K) all are attempting to do is to achieve something that sounds very simple (increase the number of editors, increase the articles, and build article quality) but yet complex to achieve. In addition to this, improving the Indian-language Wikipedias becomes even more complex for some the following reasons:

Lack of reference material available online in Indian languages.
Typing in Indian languages is a major challenge.
Relative dearth of quality content available in digital format.
Relative lack of research/academic standards, which is transferred on to Indian language Wikipedias.
Various technical issues like input, browser compatibility, font display, which deter new users.

Thus it should be noted that we should extend our work beyond Wikipedia, if we are to grow Indian-language Wikipedias. We need to think of a holistic intervention that would also involve enabling, facilitating and forming localized language-based virtual communities. That this has never been done before, and Indian language Wikipedias have a huge potential to do so.[1] This is also the significance of Indian-language Wikipedias, which are a potential (often the only) medium/platform for migrating Indian languages into the digital era. Also Wikipedia can be leveraged to further the much-needed active research culture in India and Indian culture. As a collective, we are doing something cutting edge and have too much of a risk of failure, time and again. This kind of work has failure fore-written. The only mitigation by which we can aim to be successful is by being open to learning, working as a collective, being supportive of each other, picking ourselves up whenever we fall down, and celebrating the little successes.

Language area work plans

As indicated above, the A2K team has prioritized the five languages and developed a detailed plan. We had initially set out to work with a different set of languages. The language set has slightly changed during the past two months.

Telugu
Odia
Kannada
(GOM) Konkani
Bengali

Some of the key factors that determined the selection of languages areas have included:

Networking of institutions and groups. The A2K team has put together a list of knowledge institutions, groups and individuals with whom it has some connections and believes that it can bring them into the Wikimedia movement. These collaborations will not only result in significant quality-content contributions, but will lead to the diversification and increase in that particular language Wikimedia community.
Willingness of that particular language community to interact and engage with the A2K team. Though we tried approaching other language communities, we were given to understand that they would like to consider engaging with us at a later point. We have respected the community's decision and are open to work with a couple of language areas later in time.
Work on one incubation project. During our interaction with Wikimedia India Chapter EC about the A2K plans, they have actively encouraged the A2K team to take up at least one project under incubation. Based on their suggestion we have taken up Konkani as we have some institutional contacts that could be leveraged to build the Konkani Wikipedia. The A2K team has also conducted some outreach work in Goa over the past 3–4 months that could be built on.
Familiarity of the A2K team members with the language. Each of us are editors/can edit in most of the above language Wikipedias. This will give us an insider's perspective of what is happening in that particular language community and the Wikimedia projects.

As mentioned earlier, A2K team's prioritization of working actively with these five language projects does not mean that A2K team will not support other language areas/communities. The A2K team will continue to provide overall support to all Wikipedia Communities in India. Our engagement will be activity/project-specific, based on the requests made to the A2K team by community members.

Overall A2K support to all Wikipedia communities in India

Besides the specific programs mentioned under individual language area plans, A2K team will provide overall support to all Indian-language Wikipedia communities. Please see this page for more details.

Pilot Project – Performing Arts in India

India has a wide range of performing arts. A lot of work is done on performing arts by various individuals and institutions, which offers rich knowledge about the aesthetics, artists, institutions, performance spaces/infrastructure, and policies, across various geographies and languages. This pilot is premised on a theme and seeks to create a multilingual repository of knowledge on Indian performing arts that is interdisciplinary, dynamic and ever evolving. Please go here to read more about the plan.

Learning and evaluation

Based on discussions with the Wikimedia India Chapter EC and with some members of the Community, the A2K team has arrived at some evaluation tools to assess the impact of its work. Please see this page for more details.

Giving feedback

We appreciate your valuable feedback. However, for the sake of structured engagement by everyone, we request you to consider the following before you share your feedback.

For feedback on the overall A2K Work Plan you can write here
For feedback on respective Language area plans, please write on the discussion page of the respective language plan.
- For Telugu plan here.
- For Odia plan here.
- For Kannada plan here.
- For Konkani plan here.
- For Bengali plan here.
For feedback on Pilot Project plan go here.
For feedback on Overall Support Across Indian language Communities you can write here.
Alternatively you could also share your feedback over e-mail at vishnucis-india.org. Please use the subject line Feedback on Work Plan.
Should you feel the need to discuss any aspect of the plan before sharing your feedback, please call +919845207308 from 08:00 to 21:00 hours IST (Indian Standard Time).

List of contributors

[1] Many of the challenges that we see vis-à-vis Indian-language Wikipedias are somewhat akin to the challenges print technology faced during the 19th century in India.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/resources/access-to-knowledge-work-plan